The literature around the use, efficacy and design of educational games and game-based learning approaches has been building up gradually and in phases, across different disciplines and in an ad hoc way. This has been problematic in a number of ways and resulted in fragmented literature and inconsistent referencing patterns between different sub-disciplines and countries. This is mainly because no distinct single-disciplinary perspective has emerged because of: the cross-disciplinary nature of educational games, a reliance on single-disciplinary contexts for studies, changing terminologies in different contexts and the use of multi-methodological approaches. Distinct perspectives from education science, game science, neuroscience and information science have deepened our understanding of play and games. This research has become more quantitative, rigorous and nuanced as a result of more studies focused upon therapeutic health applications of games, the serious games research movement and more efficacy and comparative studies that examine and quantify utility. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)